mental illness that you couldn t buy a gun. they repealed that. it s the only time donald trump has been in bed with the aclu. it s not going to be for any gun changes. they let mentally ill people get guns. they will not stop anyone from having a gun. background checks might have stopped this man from having a rifle, you don t know. the red flag laws might have stopped him. maybe somebody, one of his family members said there was some problem here. we don t know. we don t know when he got his gun. we don t know if he had a warrant out. we don t know any of that. we ll probably learn a lot in the next news conference. it s so sad these people died. it s tragic. we re looking at the preparations and we expect to hear a lot more. perhaps some answers to that. we re seeing governor greg abbott as well as officials from the local police force, looks like sheriff s department as well.
this attack, is just unbelievable. i think one of the questions that we re going to have to ask in pretty short order is how did he get that gun? if he was, in fact, dishonorably discharged, if we re right about that fact, let s assume that we are, he should not have been able to get a gun through the federal background check system. the question my question is, was there did he take a path around that, buy it at a gun show, did someone transfer it to him illegally? we had a huge debate about this, about four years ago in the senate, and the question is, we have a background check that is designed to keep people like this from getting guns but it has holes in it and so i think the first question we have as legislators is, was this one of those cases where the gaps in the law that led to a tragedy and is this something that we can fix without in any way
trying to do more killing. jim, forgive me if i have to jump in as we continue our conversation because we are our viewers can see the bottom right corner of their screen, we re waiting for president trump to make remarks in japan. to follow up on what you were just explaining, one of my questions here is, if you were going to buy and use a gun like this and clearly this was an incredibly high, so many victims here, does it take formal training to learn how to use this kind of a gun in a way that would then be this lethal or is that something that wouldn t necessarily be difficult to do? it really takes no training. you can buy these guns in texas like a loaf of bread. they are everywhere. you can buy them on a secondary market, at gun shows, gun stores. they are everywhere. they are everywhere in many states. they are not hard to obtain at all. he could easily obtain them and easily buy the ammunition.
he could read the instructions that come with the gun. he could just stick the magazine in if he s been in the military, then he has the basic shooting skills to do it anyway. firing a gun like this into a crowd of people that are just unarmed praying, it takes zero skill, zero skill to do that and raising a shoulder weapon up and firing it and, of course, coming with a bulletproof vest, shows he really has a plan to do the mass murder and we call it a load-bearing vest and ammunition is extremely heavy so you have to put those in pockets usually on your vest. you ll see s.w.a.t. officers all the time, if you see s.w.a.t., you ll see they have magazines on their vests because ammunition is heavy to carry and you need something over your shoulder to carry it. soldiers do that as well. a lot of these killers adopt that practice so they can carry a lot of ammunition but it takes planning, determination.
than you might imagine for the atf to run a praise on a gun and it s been set up that way by law. they are dealing with paper records and they will do it, though. they will eventually know where he purchased it. ken, i m sorry. i have to cut you off because the president is just coming to the podium. thank you for representing so well the interests of the american people in japan and the incredible relationship that you have with japan. we really appreciate it. you re doing a fantastic job. thank you. let me begin today by addressing the horrific shooting in sutherland springs, texas. our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and families of